118 naor ben-yehoyada
Transnational infrastructure projects like gas and oil pipelines have both reconnected
Europe to and through the region and increasingly rekindled images of
Mediterranean reunion of long-lost cousins (Hayes, 2004). Transnational oppor-
tunities for illicit circuits of exchange continued to practice their “corrupting”
effects on centralizing projects’ attempts at social order: from interbellum anar-
chists (Khuri-Makdisi, 2010), through drugs and arms contraband between Sicily,
the Levant, and North Africa (Ben-Yehoyada, 2012), to counter-national cultural
projects. At the same time, Cleinias’ suggestion that the preservation of states
from “luxurious and depraved habits” should situate them “about eighty stades,
roughly speaking, from the sea” (Plato, Laws, bk 4, 704b: 1952: 255) is echoed in
the French ex-president Sarkozy’s now-botched attempt to unite the Mediterranean
in Paris as much as it pertained to the Abbasid control of the Mediterranean littoral
from landlocked Baghdad. Moreover, both the Abbasids and Sarkozy’s Union for
the Mediterranean, which continued decades of NATO attempts to control the
Mediterranean during the Cold War (Ambrosetti, 2001), relied on their respec-
tive “sea of believers”—the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans—for their political
projects in their shared “sea of infidels” (Picard, 2012; Pace, 2007).
Once we examine the processes of region formation that condition the shape
and image of the Mediterranean—interaction of maritime cross-border connec-
tions and official region-making projects—it will no longer depend on any histor-
ically-bounded characteristic—economic, human-ecological, or other—nor on
any essential cultural trait. The advent of steam shipping, for example, only dis-
mantled one commerce-based cluster of connectivity formation. It did not rule
out the possibility of future region formation. The contemporary Mediterranean
is often declared fragmented and disharmonious, that is, according to erstwhile
standards of wholesomeness and harmony. In contemporary accounts of the
Mediterranean, the two most frequent features are tourism and clandestine migra-
tion, both referring to locals’ xenophobia, which faces north in the former case
and south in the latter. Yet limiting the current Mediterranean to these two
phenomena risks judging whatever we see in and around the sea as relics of a
pre-modern past, rather than transformed continuations of it in the present. It is
therefore our task to search for structural similarities across periods even more
than continuities: not to show that the Mediterranean is still alive in the habits of
thought of some of its residents, but to argue that it could re-emerge as a trans-
national constellation in modern times. Acknowledging that would give us both a
modern Mediterranean and a Mediterranean modernity.
ReferencesAbulafia, D. (2011) The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, London: Allen Lane.
Albera, D. and Blok, A. (2001) Introduction, in L’anthropologie de La Méditerranée =
Anthropology of the Mediterranean (eds D. Albera, A. Blok and C. Bromberger), Paris:
Maisonneuve et Larose, pp. 43–57.
Ambrosetti, M. (2001) NATO’s Mediterranean dialogue. The International Spectator: Italian
Journal of International Affairs, 36 (1): 83–89.
Ballinger, P. (2003) History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.